


Drown

by Etwas_Schlau



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Anxiety, Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Roller Coaster, F/F, Healing, Heavy Angst, Hopeful Ending, Introspection, Lapis needs a hug, One Shot, POV Third Person Limited, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Present Tense, Psychological Trauma, Recovery, Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Hatred, Suicide Attempt, Triggers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-10
Updated: 2017-06-10
Packaged: 2018-11-12 12:01:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11161443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Etwas_Schlau/pseuds/Etwas_Schlau
Summary: drown (pronunciation: /droun/) verb: die through submersion in and inhalation of water.I walk to youRain falls from youCan you wash me?Can you drown me?Please?





	Drown

**Author's Note:**

> **Note:** I do not own Steven Universe. All rights to the cartoon and its characters belong to Rebecca Sugar.
> 
> I felt like shit so I wrote an emotional lapidot vent fic. the song in the summary is drown by Tyler Joseph. i hope you guys enjoy the ride

Grey.

Everything is grey.

The grass, the sand, the sky, the lulling waves gnawing on the jagged coastline, it's all bleached a sickening shade of silver by the full moon hanging in the navy planes of the sky. Round and crystal white, like an ever-watching eyeball, it glares down upon Lapis Lazuli.

Her blue hair rises in the wind, salty sea air stinging her eyes. Her alabaster teeth flash silver in the starlight, empty breaths whispering across them as her gaze flickers upward to the cloudless heavens above. The night is clear, giving way to a sky full of twinkling stars, and the sight makes her scoff mirthlessly.

If Peridot were with her the quiet night would be alight with her reedy voice raving about world sprawled across the sky’s dome like a canvas painting. Many of their nights together had been spent outdoors in biting cold and oppressive darkness as Peridot gazed skyward, pointing out stars with endearingly eccentric enthusiasm. She could spend hours on end naming and describing hundreds of stars; what colour and size and classifications they were, what star systems they belonged to, which were suns and which were white dwarfs and which were red supergiants.

Thinking of her companion sleeping peacefully back at the barn, cyan skin and cobalt hair laugh darkly, and it is a dead, sickly sound that echoes in the night. Deep in the depths of her soul, hidden where only her most disgraceful secrets lie, Lapis envies her friend. She envies her positivity, her forgiveness. She wishes peace would come to her as easily as it came to Peridot. Every instance of Peridot's peace of mind and joviality Lapis has been privy to, while endearing, has also been bittersweet like hot blood; she almost finds herself wishing Peridot were closer to her own broken, misanthropic mental state.

Such contemptible thoughts never fail to cause a sickening black hole of guilt in Lapis' gut.

Sudden rage bubbles up in her hollow chest, distorted and vague. There is no direction, no destination, and her flailing mind is frantically scrambling, searching. Sifting through piles of dead, ancient demons in the crazed pursuit of something real and tangible to be angry at. In the end she always finds herself back in this same position, playing the same masochistic game.

By now she knows too well that trying to assign the blame of all her problems onto a singular thing is an infuriatingly futile quest. But despite this, every figurative bone in her body burns to find a concrete reason, a be-all and end-all of her suffering. Most of all, a beginning. More than anything else, she just wants to identify when everything began crumbling around her. It’s been too long, an endless, lonely battle between herself and seemingly the entire world around her. A war raging relentlessly for as long as she can remember, weighing on her psyche to the point of madness.

She is beyond tears, beyond breakdowns, beyond wide eyes and laboured breathing and panic. The agony has become commonplace and in a way, that is the most terrifying fact of all. Pain and hurt, unrest with no explanation, a cloying, morose anguish hanging in her mind like a sodden blanket thrown over her shoulders, she has become so accustomed to their place in her life that she scarcely recalls who she was before. The fact that she cannot distinguish the borderline between her past contentedness and more recent turmoil is the most insulting of any indignity.

It speaks of her ability to notice the happenings of her own mind, she thinks. Having no solid turning point, no remembrance of the crossroads when her world started to quake, proves that her descent into disarray was gradual rather than instantaneous as she likes to believe it had been. She feels shortsighted and senseless for not noticing the change. She had been oblivious, unable to recognize her shifting mental state until it was so severe she could hardly function. She blames herself, knowing there is no one else to rebuke. If she had only been smarter, more attentive, perhaps, she wouldn’t now be up to her shoulders in sand.

Sand, heavy and coarse, thick and stifling. She can practically feel the weight, the pressure, squeezing in on her like a massive fist strangling the life force from her soul. She hasn’t any idea how one can be so empty yet so overwhelmingly engulfed at the same instant. All she wants is a moment of peace, anything to reignite the spark inside of her, to replace the hope and optimism she is so desperately missing. Even lazy evenings spent making jokes and watching Camp Pining Hearts with Peridot aren’t truly free. There’s always a downside, a reprise. All it takes is one too-tight hug or too-harsh playful slap to send her spiraling into a shuddering panic attack. Her episodes have become so frequent that Peridot has learned to walk on eggshells around her, being careful not to touch her any more than a fleeting pat or dare mention ‘the J-word,’ as she calls it.

With this comes a shame more intense than most anything she’s ever experienced. It was her who held Jasper at the bottom of the ocean when they were Malachite, it was her who fought and screamed and used her counterpart as a whipping post to vent her most hidden inner rage and insecurities. Worst of all, it was her who enjoyed the tormenting and her who missed her after their eventual split. Logically, Jasper should be the one traumatized, haunted with nightmares and flashbacks.

It makes no sense for her to react so strongly to something she herself did. She wonders whether she is subconsciously exaggerating the reactions she has, simply manipulating and playing for the attention and sympathy of others. In a moment, she decides that she must be, for otherwise she has no excuses.

Suddenly there is a sound of splashing water as wings form from the teardrop-shaped gem on her back. Without much effort she is soaring, lifting in the gentle kiss of the wind keeping her aloft. She remembers how much the feeling of the ocean breeze dancing through her hair and across her skin used to excite her and a sour lump forms in her throat, her stomach knotting. She feels nothing, yet she feels everything. Most of all, she feels broken. Defective.

Wrong.

There is no preparation, no steeling herself. No mental war or struggle, n dramatic moment of decision. There are no thoughts, only actions, as she angles her body downward and pulls her hydrokinetic wings inward. She is falling, plummeting, like a space shuttle returning to earth. She collides with sea as a bullet striking steel, body stinging from the impact, ears heavy with the sound of water rushing past her. Her momentum quickly slows and she’s floating in the sea as if she were aloft in space.

She’s closer to the surface than she’d imagined she would be (and she’s imagined scenarios like this more often than she cares to admit,) only a few feet from thin air if her vision is correct. Being a gem rather than a human, however, her body does not float, and she doesn’t have to worry about resurfacing. As calm and disinterested as any other breath she’s ever taken in, Lapis inhales a lungful of water. The salt burns her throat. She doesn’t care.

Her body is starting to react, arms and legs thrashing with the instinctual desire to survive. Her mind, however, is disconnected from her screaming lungs and raging limbs. As her physical form begins to shut down, her thoughts wander to the future and how the Crystal Gems will react to her having disappeared without a trace. She’s sure Steven and Peridot will be distraught, sending out search parties and begging the rest of the gems to keep looking long after they’ve lost hope. She doesn’t know how her disappearance will affect Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl, if at all. She decides that she’s fine not knowing.

Her appendages are locking up, becoming stiff and unmovable as her body prepares to do away with her form and shift into her gem state. She understands that even drowning herself can’t fully kill her. All she will do is poof, she knows that no matter how hard she tries some small part of her will still be alive and vaguely aware, even after her gem has inevitably sunk to the ocean floor. Regardless, higher functions will desert her and she’ll get the result she wants; total unawareness. Freedom. Peace.

Searing, shooting pain converges in her chest and she screeches into the water in agony. As part of her slowly dies, she frowns at the thought of her old barn mate and how her essential suicide will hurt her. She almost wishes she had left a note of some sort, any indication of what had happened to her. Peridot wasn’t the type to let things go easily; she’d likely theorize about alien abduction or Homeworld capture and Lapis would have chuckled at that were she not in excruciating pain. But she also knows that Peridot would probably spend the rest of her life wondering what happened to her.

As her physical form poofs back into her gem and her mind shuts down, Lapis Lazuli whispers final words into the sea.

_“I’m sorry, Peridot.”_

 

**~*~**

 

There’s a dull buzzing, ringing. White noise and the sound of waves, like running a faucet while your head is underwater. A high pitched squawk pierces the static. It’s wet. It’s cold. There’s movement. Lapis Lazuli is not present.

 

**~*~**

 

Movement. The sound of water is quieter now. The cold and wet is replaced with hot and dry. There’s cover, something sticking to a damp surface. Heat. Even hotter. Another squawk. A cacophony of distant squawks. Lapis Lazuli is not present.

 

**~*~**

 

Movement. More movement. Loud noises. Louder. Heat, swift movement. Constant motion, shrill sounds and deep sounds and sounds in the middle. The motion has ceased. Heat and soft sensations. Touch. Very quiet sounds. Lapis Lazuli is not present.

 

**~*~**

 

Pain. There is an excruciating amount of pain. A sudden burst of heat and it’s growing, stretching. Someone is screaming. The taste of saltwater is cloying and overpowering. A head forms, a face, a torso, two arms, two legs, two hands, two feet, ten fingers, ten toes. The pain ceases once Lapis Lazuli has reformed, lying panting on Steven Universe’s bed.

 

**~*~**

 

There are hugs and tears and yells and words, all swirling into a hurricane of overstimulation Lapis’ newly awakened mind can’t comprehend yet. She vaguely hears Garnet advising the others to give her space and then silence falls like a soft summer rain.

The air is thick like molasses and each breath she takes tastes sickly and saccharine. She’s hyperventilating before she knows it, mind racing with thousands of thoughts coalescing and casting shadows across her mind. She wishes she were back home at the barn in her hammock with country air rushing through her hair and distant birds singing lilting songs. She pulls her legs to her chest and hides her face in her knees, unkempt locks draping over her cyan skin.

She can’t do this here. Not now, not in front of everyone. She can feel the gems’ eyes burning into her, overseeing her like a supervised toddler. She wants to scream and cry, to summon the same ocean water that drowned her and destroy everything she can until she’s surrounded by wreckage that matches the whirlwind she feels inside her chest. But she can’t, she couldn't do that, so instead she clenches her fists and scrunches her eyebrows and begs the universe to relieve the pressure building between her eyes.

“Lazuli!”

Her head snaps up to see Peridot gazing up at her from the doorway, green eyes gleaming with tears. Hardly a heartbeat passes before she is crashing into her, small arms wrapping around her torso and grinning face pressing into her chest. Her mere presence is enough to regulate Lapis’ sporadic breathing, peroxide blonde hair smelling of machine oil and spearmint engulfing her like a blanket. Peridot is laughing, eyes crinkling as joyful tears glide down her cheeks. She’s radiating glee and it’s contagious; for a moment everything that’s ever happened fades into the background and there is no one and nothing but Lapis Lazuli and Peridot embracing one another, laughing like idiots.

The clamour soon dies down and Peridot pulls away from Lapis. The other gems are tentatively returning, standing a few paces away at the foot of the ladder leading to Steven’s bed. The oppressive quiet is back and she has to speak, has to start the inevitable conversation somehow.

“How long has it been?”

Garnet and Pearl exchange a glance before the latter speaks. “Well, it’s been about six months since your… disappearance. We found your gem washed up on the shore a week ago.”

Steven’s scaling the ladder and butting into the conversation before Lapis has time to react. “We were so worried about you! We thought you were gone for good!” he leans in for a vice-grip hug, rambling on at lightning speed. “It was so scary when you didn’t come back and Peridot freaked out and we looked for you but we couldn’t find anything and-”

Garnet silences the boy with a hand ruffling his hair. “Easy now, we don’t want to overwhelm her.”

There is a minute of tension as every person in the room contemplates asking the one question they all know is itching at everyone’s mind. After a bit, Amethyst is the one to say it.

“So what happened to you, dude? We thought you might have gotten lost or somethin’.”

A sharp inhale chokes in her dry throat. Lapis doesn’t want to tell the truth, most certainly not in front of Steven, but there are five pairs of eyes boring expectantly into hers. She knows there’s no way she’ll be able to avoid the question so she closes her weary eyes and confesses.

“I threw myself in the ocean.”

A chorus of _what_ ’s erupts from the gems, suddenly all wide eyes and gaping mouths and palpable shock. Pearl’s brows are knitted together in pity, hand resting over a heart she doesn’t have. Steven and Amethyst are still reeling in stupor, and even Garnet's usually expressionless mouth is wide open.

Then there’s Peridot. Her face is contorted in a visage of heartbreak and anguish and Lapis’ chest squeezes at the knowledge that she caused such grief. In that moment all Lapis wishes is that she could simply disappear, vanish into thin air and let the world turn without her in it.

Steven then seems to break from his awe, frowning deeply as he pipes up with a quiet, broken, “W-what?”

Lapis is suddenly enraged, furious with herself for being stupid and reckless and hurting the people she cares about. Before she can reel herself in, she’s practically foaming at the mouth. “I drowned myself, okay!? I got up in the middle of the night, walked on the beach, and drowned myself so I’d poof back into my gem. I didn’t _want_ to wash up on the beach and reform, I _wanted_ to sink to the bottom of the ocean and never be found!”

Peridot finally speaks her first words since she cried out Lapis’ name upon entering the house. “Wh-why? Why would you do that to yourself?”

“Because I want to be gone, okay? What isn’t you all don’t get? I’m sick! I’m not like the rest of you who just got past what happened to you! Something's wrong with me and there’s no way to change it!”

“Lapis, we’ve all been through a lot since the war and-”

“ _No_!” Lapis shouts, cutting Pearl off mid-sentence and starling the whole room. “Don’t you _dare_ say you know what I’m going through! You couldn’t understand unless you’ve felt what I feel! Losing your unrequited lover to a decision she willingly made doesn’t mean you have any idea what hell I walk through every day!”

At the dramatic gasp from Pearl, Lapis sighs, standing and jumping from the bed to the floor. “Look, I’m not trying to lessen what you’ve been through, Pearl, but you can’t compare that to this. I can’t explain how I feel and there’s no way you or Garnet or any of you can comprehend it because _you’ve_ never felt it. I’m just- broken,” Lapis hisses, her anger subsiding and a hollow sorrow taking its place, “and you can’t fix me.”

There is no sound from anyone as cyan skin and zaffre hair collapse to the floor with crossed legs and a face hidden behind two hands. The pitter-patter of footsteps catches Lapis' attention before a tiny hand lands on her shoulder.

“Lapis,” comes Peridot’s soft, apprehensive voice. “You’re right, we _don’t_ know what exactly you’re going through, but we care. We love you… _I_ love you. We may not be able to feel what you feel, but we can be here when you need us to be if you just tell us when something’s going on and how we can help.”

Suddenly Garnet is beside her as well, patting her opposite shoulder. “You have trauma to work through, but you’re not broken. There might not be a way to 'fix' it, but there _is_ recovery.”

Pearl too steps over, smiling softly. “We can’t promise you’ll never have bad days, it’ll be hard and there’ll be times you’ll want to give up.”

Steven leaps down alongside the others, grinning widely as he adds, “But we’ll always be here when you need us. After all, you’re a Crystal Gem now!”

“Yeah, bro, say the word and we’ll do whatever you need, no problem,” Amethyst finishes, folding her arms behind her head as she joins the rest of her friends.

Lapis looks up at the sincere, tender faces surrounding her and smiles genuinely for the first time in months. Tears prickle at her eyes and she laughs absurdly, one hand supporting her head while the other clutches her stomach. Her entire body lights up with warmth and she feels truly loved in a way she hasn’t in centuries. She mentally ridicules her past behaviour, the way she had thought she was alone in the battle. She had thought the other gems didn't care, but in that moment she understands that she actually means something to them, even if she doesn't feel like she deserves it. The gems can be something more than just friends, they can be a support group, but better. One of the earth’s best traditions; a family. Something she’ll never let go of.

 

 

“Wait, Peridot, did you say you _love_ me?”

**Author's Note:**

> I was planning on writing some grim, sad bullshit but it turned into a hopeful thing about healing and recovery and i'm honestly kinda proud
> 
> (can gems drown? probably not, don't question it.)
> 
> find me on tumblr at comrade-schlau.tumblr.com


End file.
